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Enterprises can now run Hortonworks' Hadoop-based Data Platform in Rackspace's managed hosting environment and its public cloud.

Big data applications are difficult to deploy and harder to maintain, so many companies need help analyzing and extracting value from this vast amount of information, according to Rackspace. Like other cloud vendors, Rackspace pitches this new offering as a way to reduce the amount of time required to deploy and maintain a Hadoop-based environment.

Rackspace also offers customized configurations to address specific requirements such as high compute or high storage workloads. To minimize the work needed to move to the cloud, existing tools can still be used, it said. But convincing enterprises to move their Hadoop applications to the cloud may not be that easy.

"We used to run on [Amazon Web Services' Elastic MapReduce], but about two years ago we moved to an in-house cluster because of the costs of EMR. We've expanded that cluster to almost 700 nodes. Next to that, most of our infrastructure is in-house and with the amount of data that we produce, transferring everything to a public cloud would be very costly," said Wouter de Bie, team lead for data infrastructure at music service Spotify, via email.

Rackspace wouldn't provide the pricing for the HDP offering, but said that there is a per-node charge on top of the other hardware, software and support charges for Hadoop.

Rackspace isn't the only company HortonWorks has been working with on HD . The company recently announced that SAP will resell the platform and provide enterprise support. It also announced the integration of Ambari -- a framework for provisioning, managing and monitoring Hadoop clusters -- and Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager.

Last week, Hortonworks announced HDP 2.0, which uses Apache Hadoop YARN as the underlying OS. That allows users to move beyond batch processing to a multi-use platform that enables batch, interactive, online and stream processing, the company said.

Hortonworks was founded in 2011 by 24 engineers from the original Yahoo Hadoop development and operations team, and has been growing since. This year the company increased its presence in Europe with teams in France, Germany and the U.K.